


Lasciate Ogne Speranza

by HellboundHeart



Category: Constantine (TV), Hannibal (TV), Hannibal Lecter Series - All Media Types, Hannibal Lecter Tetralogy - Thomas Harris, Hellblazer & Related Fandoms
Genre: Exactly What It Says on the Tin, M/M, Magic, Murder, Murder Mystery
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-24
Updated: 2021-02-10
Packaged: 2021-03-07 19:40:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26613124
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HellboundHeart/pseuds/HellboundHeart
Summary: A string of murders in Baltimore brings together the Chesapeake Ripper and the Laughing Magician.
Relationships: Hannibal Lecter/ John Constantine, Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter
Comments: 2
Kudos: 14





	1. Eternal I endure

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A bloodied painting sparks the interest of Hannibal Lecter while a new killer stalks Baltimore.

**Before me things created were none, save things Eternal, and Eternal I endure.**

_\- Dante Alighieri, 'The Divine Comedy, Inferno, 3.7-8'_

  
Prologue

The door opened, letting in the smells of death - coppery blood, reeking offal, and rot setting in - all the things that happened to the human body when life stopped and the bacteria within went to work. Not that anyone in the outer room noticed it except one. The assembled FBI had grown too used to death to notice it or were too busy. Only Hannibal Lecter breathed in could appreciate all the layers. Especially the ones that did not belong.

While the rest of the room was filled with the other motions of death, only Hannibal stood off to the side of it, watching it all as if it were a mildly interesting play instead of reality. Reddish dust from their fingerprint kits drifted lazily in the air, unnoticed by any of the agents. The usual black type wouldn't have shown as well on the dead artist's heavy dark furniture. The fact that it was nicknamed _'Dragon's Blood'_ had amused Hannibal before. It didn't now. His dry cleaner was sure to complain. The unseen specks of dust would stain dreadfully if precautions weren't taken beforehand. He'd have to be sure to warn his service.

The arrival of Will from the bedroom/studio relieved him of some of that concern over his wardrobe. The same odd mixture of smells drifted from that room again, sparking his curiosity. Few crime scenes carried the scent of lemon, tea tree, eucalyptus, cajeput, camphor and the sharp acrid reek of fake indigo dye. Cajeput itself was offensive to his nose, but the mix of all the others was flat out wrong. It wasn't until Will stopped just outside the door that Hannibal caught a whiff of henna, probably the cheap powder versus the real thing given the chemical overtones. The dead artist must have been mixing dyes.

The rush of cheap English Leather aftershave along with the medicinal sweat from Bella's sickness that Crawford probably didn't notice anymore proceeded the man's himself joining them. Hannibal supposed that aftershave was better than the Brut that Crawford sometimes used instead, but not by much. Honestly, hadn't any of them ever experimented with something their father hadn't worn?

"Will?" Crawford asked. He focused on Will's face expectantly in a way Hannibal hated. It reminded him of a vulture looking to feast.

It struck Hannibal then that he didn't smell the usual mix of fear, fever and last night's whisky on Will's skin. Or rather 'whiskey'. The fever being gone didn't surprise Hannibal. It still came and went. Disappointing, but the good doctor was patient. Remissions were always temporary things with Will's particular brand of sickness. The newness of Will not being able to crawl into someone's skin made up for the stalling of Will's disease.

"I can't get a handle on this one," Will said quietly, eyes touching on his and then Crawford's. "She was there and painting, but even that doesn't make sense."

"Was it the Ripper?" Crawford asked, the only real question he had. Just as Will was moving through his cycle of remission and active disease, Hannibal had observed that Crawford was again fixated on the Chesapeake Ripper. He wondered if the upper echelon of the FBI were needing an excuse for a larger budget or just tired of waiting. Either answer would have been uninteresting to him. His art was no longer for them or the casual observer.

"No. Maybe. I don't think so," Will said with a sigh, taking off his glasses to rub at his eyes.

That did touch Hannibal's interest. "Maybe?"

Sliding his glasses back on, Will glanced at the room behind him and back to them. "It's a set stage, Jack. A performance, but it's not for us. It's for someone else. It's like some of the Ripper's ... showing off, but there's a desperation mixed in. It's like two people trying to send a message at once on the same line. She - she killed herself, I'm almost sure of it, but I'm missing ' _why_ '."

"Labs might show us something. Could be chemical or medical. Psychological, maybe," Crawford began slowly, disappointment heard in his voice. "Something might come to you later."

Hannibal took that as his signal to go take a look himself. Will had been ushered into the murder scene as soon as the techs were finished, but Hannibal had been too caught up with asking Jack about Bella's failing condition to be at his side. Unfortunate, but courtesy must be observed. Plus, it was fascinating in its own way to watch all the little screws holding legendary FBI iron man Jack Crawford together being slowly loosened bit by bit as Bella died in inches before him. It was almost regretful that she was sure to die soon. The smell of her clinging to Jack told him she couldn't hold on much longer, especially with her will to live gone. A shame, but that same death would open other possibilities as it closed others.

That was for later, and this was for now.

The artist's bedroom was as dull as the rest of the loft, a play at pretension in Hannibal's opinion. Given the trinkets scattered about and the few books on scattered forms of witchcraft on the shelf in here pointed towards that. None of them were on a certain subject or facet such as Wicca or scrying, a mishmash of someone uncertain but interested made up the reading. All had shiny soft covers with no real creases. Barely opened then. A person's bookshelf revealed a lot about them.

What graced the left wall even more so in this situation.

The painting spanned most of the wall, roughly six feet tall and four wide. The blood splatters on it did little to detract from its beauty. Or perhaps it was only oddness. Hannibal wasn't sure which he'd class it under just yet. He did know he'd have to draw it himself later, refine some of the details... perhaps after he found the model. It was of a unremarkable man in what he believed was a tan trenchcoat. The waist had a belt hanging open and continued below the drawn point of view, too long to be a simple blazer or coat. He was shown from the left side, looking off at something out of frame. His hair was blonde and untidy as if caught in a breeze, a few brush strokes denoting some stubble on his chin. Tie drawn down and shirt loose, his clothing wasn't anything outlandish or expensive that would identify him. The spectral snake that wound around him, head or tail disappearing up at the top reminded Hannibal of a hangman's noose although the man showed no distress at his position. In his left hand he was casually tossing a bright apple. An angel, Hannibal supposed, since the Biblical connotation fairly slapped one in the face. It was the man's expression that drew him in since the rendering itself was fairly amateurish. Any first-year art student could have reproduced the same. A small smirking smile shaped the man's mouth, eyebrows drawn down with eyes challenging whatever he was looking at. Shadowing had been heavily used ( _overused, he thought_ ) with a broad swoop under the man's eye and across his brow.

Yes, he'd have to draw it himself later, guessing at blue or green for the man's eyes. Something light and nearly clear in the painting that had been hastily done on the wall.

That rush of English Leather again told of him of Jack's arrival at his side before the man spoke. Hannibal took the opportunity to get the first word in and shape things as he wanted. "Henna. Typically used for body art. Odd to choose that when she has a palette of acrylics in the other room."

"Is that what the smell is?" Jack asked, leaning in to look over the painting himself.

"Every color has its own essential oil added," Hannibal said, deciding that the man's eyes had to be blue. He was catching a whiff of lavender from that paint, Bulgarian to be exact unless he missed his guess.

The rest of the room had other less pleasing scents. 'Less pleasing' to others, but worthy of note to Hannibal. He was sure they would find her lungs and nasal passages clogged with sputum and mucous, a clear sign of the agony she must have been in before death. That sort of pain without stop led to the thoracic and abdominal muscles going as still as they could like a held breath - 'splinting' they had called it in medical school. Her endocrine panel would have been interesting to see with all her body would have done to preserve itself even as it _appeared_ she mutilated herself. Eyes were pulled out and tossed aside into a paint water cup. Cuts covered her body, bruising making her a less attractive canvas, and fingers broken from what looked to be her beating on her own face and body. She had literally destroyed herself with her own paint splattered hands, tearing away skin and whatever her nails could reach before she died. The throat had seemed to be her main target after she had extracted her eyes. Terrible and ever so odd.

Hannibal wondered if she had painted blind or not. The post-mortem might tell him. Another oddity in a case that interested even him.

"What do you make of what she wrote, Doctor Lecter?"

"I don't know, although I can't imagine it is too helpful. That is one of the more common names in the English speaking world. Her own blood?"

"We'll know when Beverly finishes her tests, but it looks like it."

"Ah."

He left Jack to his musings and the others to their measuring or picture taking. Will Graham was who he wanted to speak with, to see the world through the victim's destroyed eyes. The lack of full vision was troubling with the encepahlitis calming down. Troubling, but Hannibal considered himself adaptable if nothing else. With luck, he might get a catch a fever-sweet scent from Will himself to signal the return of his sickness tomorrow or the next day now that they had a case to work on that Crawford was sure to try to put off onto the 'Ripper'. If that failed, maybe Will would know why their cooling corpse wrote those words at the bottom of her artwork as she was surely dying. The three words were clumsily written across the wall, drying from red to a dull rust.

**HELP ME, JOHN**


	2. Chapter One : The Suffering City

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fate begins to draw them together as the past revisits the present.

**Through me the way into the suffering city**  
_\- Dante Alighieri, 'The Divine Comedy, Inferno, 3.1'_

Chapter One

**Wolf Trap, Virginia  
\------------------**

Hannibal closed the door of Will's home gently behind him. The pack of dogs surged past him and into the night, nails scrabbling on the wooden stairs and crunching on leaves. In a week or two there would be frost. Another month would bring the first dusting of snow. On this chilly night, the fog had crept in and eaten up everything to about waist height. The pack of dogs seemed to delight in racing in and out of the trees, their barking sounding distant in the mist. Will's porchlight created a warm glow, leaving the sensation that they were all that existed in the night.

"I miss the crickets," Will said quietly, turning his drink in his hand restlessly. 

The waft of cheap whiskey Hannibal caught from the glass was faint, diluted by a lot of water. With the receding of his encephalitis, Will's drinking was retreating as well. There was a new scent accompanying those, something willow bark-like. He supposed Will had blundered into some sort of homeopathic remedy. He'd have to find out who gave the accidental relief to his dear Will when he grew tired of watching how this recovery went. 

It had been two weeks since their dead artist. Hannibal had created two sketches of the original painting since then, one with the Biblical feathered wings and one without. The one 'with' had been burnt. There was something in that smile that didn't lend itself to an angelic quality. The perfect copy he'd made had been set aside when a petty killer had occupied the FBI's time and his by extension. Not that Hannibal minded. It gave him time to watch Will, draw closer to him. Of the man in the drawing and the dead artist, there had been nothing. All chemical tests had come back clean, all fingerprints hers. It was ruled suicide and shuffled away. Sad perhaps, Hannibal thought, but that was the fate of many things that didn't involve Jack's elusive Ripper.

"Who is that?"

Will's voice brought Hannibal back to the here and now instead of his memory palace where he had been contemplating his memory of the original painting. The dogs had returned, all of them clustered around the porch and silent. The weak moonlight caught on multiples sets of canine teeth bared in silent snarls. Watching. It reminded him of the wolves of his childhood, a pack waiting to fight or flee. They stared at the same thing Will was.

His first reaction was to call it a trick of the fog. He neither heard nor smelled anything off. The poor light and shifting mist had formed a humanlike figure, one that looked as if its head was turned towards them while it lounged against a tree. 

"John," Will breathed out.

Hannibal's eyes snapped off the figure and to Will. Will's pupils were blown wide, skin covered in a sudden sweat. _There_ was that sharp tang of fear he hadn't smelled lately. It cut through everything like a tongue tip running unexpectedly across the cold metal of a razorblade inside a sweet. He fancied he could hear Will's heart going from slow to a galloping pace. The predator in Hannibal was intrigued and wondered if Will could crawl into the mind of this 'John' now.

The misty figure stared back at him and Will, that smirking smile from the painting now on the barely distinguishable face. Trenchcoat and untamed hair, unremarkable face. It was the portrait, but Hannibal had to ask himself how much his own sense of suggestion was filling in the foggy shape. Then the 'man' tucked a cigarette into his mouth and his hands cupped to protect the lighter's flame. While everything so far could be put off to imagination, that flare of fire was no illusion. It shone bright as a star, the man himself watching them over it as he lit his cigarette. Will drew in a sharp breath beside him, Hannibal himself taking in every detail. Blue. Oh yes. Those eyes were a light blue, the same color of an empty winter sky versus Will's dark and turbulent deep-sea ones. A breath of smoke blew from his mouth in a dragon's plume, the jaded smile laughing at the world as he did himself. Yet those coldly analytical eyes reflected none of that bitter mirth or any humor at all. In his memory palace, Hannibal already wound and unwound that half-second of time to study the man further.

The moonlight brightened, and the shape fell apart as he imagined he heard an old-fashioned metal cigarette light snap closed. It (he) became nothing more than movements of the rising fog rolling in from the bay. 

"Hannibal?"

The dogs were still silent, slow to return to their sniffing and roaming. Their exuberance was gone, the pack keeping close to Will with tails tucked and eyes watchful.

"Did you see him?" Will asked, voice hushed as if they still had an unseen audience. Minute sloshings told Hannibal that the whiskey in Will's glass was trembling with his unsteady hand. Odd for a man who regularly saw a raven feathered stag or reenactments of others' violence from behind their eyes. That glass was accidentally upended when Will forgot he was holding it and checked his watch. "It's 11:14pm, my name is Will Graham, and I'm in Wolf Trap, Virginia, with Doctor Hannibal Lecter."

The inner debate of which answer to give was short. When he drew in a breath of the night air, Hannibal could smell cigarette smoke... unfiltered, some English or French brand. Not smooth enough to be American but not harsh enough to be Eastern European. A weak whiff of salty sweat lingered in the wake of the smoke, not unlike that of the distant ocean. But this was tainted with liquor and something else. It was a scent Hannibal Lecter, who could diagnose his friend's brain on fire at just a breath, could not place. It was like a cold sharp wind blowing through a forest, one that was enough to take a person's breath away or freeze the lungs in one's chest. "I saw him, Will."

"Oh good. Hate to be going crazier alone," Will said with a tight little laugh. "Change your mind on that drink before you go, Doctor?"

"I think I have, Will."

**Atlanta, Georgia  
\---------------**

He blinked, reality coming back into focus. Whatever one wanted to call 'reality'.

Smoke drifted around John Constantine. Some was from the cigarette, the rest from the candles that had been snuffed by ... well, whatever that had been. So much for his divining today's Pick 3 and Pick 4. At least the horse races had paid off yesterday. Capnomancy was a fool's game at best, but John had discovered long ago the dangers of ignoring signs from the universe. Ending up arse-deep in whatever newest plot this week's Super Bad had cooked up was a hell of a learning aid. No pun intended.

Opening a window, he let the drifting wisps of smoke out. All of them turned in coils until they tore apart into nothingness. _Bad luck there, Johnny-Boy._ Dropping back into his chair, he lit a cigarette and closed his eyes. And wanted a drink. But that would mean getting up and trudging all the way to the kitchen. Chas had cleaned against John's will and moved his little stashes to fuck with him. 

There had been two of them in barely lit moonlit darkness. It had been cold but no snow. Dogs had been around him, chasing and running through the fog. One had said his name, the younger with his hair in curls.

Not a Cindy. No hair of gold there. And not many clues on where or who those two were. 

Like all things that couldn't be immediately answered, John put the matter from his mind. At least consciously. He'd found that if he let his lower thinking ruminate on a matter for a bit, something usually floated to the surface. With some luck what bobbed to the surface later wouldn't be rotted and churning with maggots. 

Yeah, as if _that_ ever happened. By tea, he'd have some bugger threatening darkness on the coast or to lash him a million times. Not that John minded a good lashing provided it was done proper like with quality leather and the right commanding voice. A million seemed a little excessive though. After ten, the whole experience began to lose its thrill. He had to sit on that reddened arse the next day.

Shoving open the doors resulted in his senses being brutally assaulted by the antiseptic scent of Pine-Sol and bleach. Nesting. Chas had to be nesting to attack him like this. Taking a deep drag off his cigarette to drive off the spectre of cleanliness, John squared his shoulders and waded into battle. Said 'battle' being in the kitchen by the sound of things being shoved about. Good enough since he wanted to fry himself an egg and have something of a proper breakfast. At noon. It counted. Really.

"Renee must be thinking of taking you back," John said, purposely ashing his cigarette on the now clean floor of his kitchen as Chas shoved the last pot into one of the cabinet. The cockroaches must have been outraged at this infringement on their territory. They and John had an agreement.

Only the twitch of one shoulder betrayed Chas' surprise at hearing John's voice behind him. "Aren't you supposed to be headed to Baltimore?"

"I would have but my faithful driver is currently breaking a year's worth of peace treaties with various sludge entities. Drove Mange out too, did you? Into terrorising little white rabbits now, Chas? For shame."

Chas stood up to his full height, tossing the bleach soaked sponge into a sink that had only just recently known what it was to exist without a scum of poured out alcohol and crumbs of takeaway coating it. The Thing That Lived In The Garbage Disposal probably wasn't too thrilled about this new state of things. It had a terrible bleach allergy, poor thing. John expected it would take back up with The Creeping Darkness Beneath The Icebox to find some relief. "I told you I've still got that thing..."

A much put upon sigh and John Constantine nodded. Oh yeah. _That_. "Almost forgot."

"Mange ran off to visit Zatanna. Packed up his carrots and said he'd join you later, although he did mention Boston instead of Baltimore so take that as you will. Your bag is by the door. Got you booked on a train in and one out the next day. Didn't figure it will take you longer than that to get that relic from Notre Dame."

That grin was unmistakable even as John dumped more ash from his cigarette onto Chas' cleaned floor. Little victories mattered. "An all girl's college, Chas. Naughty nurses at that, mate."

When Chas' gaze dropped to the ash on the floor and narrowed in a way that spoke of not appreciating John's cheerful outlook on visiting Baltimore, John felt it best to grab his bag and head for the door. The fact that Chas had been reaching for a broom like a barbarian readying a club to crush some innocent to a pulp might have influenced that decision. Getting beaten down on his own _clean_ kitchen floor would have been a bit too much to bear.

"Nesting," John said to no one in particular as he headed for the road and the waiting taxi.

It crashed two miles down the road with John in the backseat readying to light a cigarette. The driver had turned to tell him not to when a shape ran into the road.

Fate is a terrible mistress. Even when one is watching for the signs like Constantine was, it sometimes isn't enough. As Fate and a wizard intent on turning every Siamese cat in the world into his little minions would have it, winter had settled in before John made it to Baltimore. Things had ended predictably enough in the case of the cats. Bast (or Isis, depending on which mythology one favored) didn't like her children trifled with. Cats never had been domesticated. They just liked to let the humans think they had been. Siamese cats in particular rattled John. Little blue-eyed bastards always seemed to know _something_ no one else did and lorded that secret insight.

The lurid pink of a Valentine's display in a candy shop reflected on the dark frosted windows of John's train when it pulled into the Baltimore station.

In that time, the Ripper had also killed again. Twice. On that February night, the deaths were slowly fading off the front page of the newspapers. Murder only sold well when it was a fresh horror.

**BAU (Behavioral Analysis Unit) Headquarters, Quantico, Virginia  
\--------------------------------------------**

"I need help."

"Jack, we've known each other a long time, and this Ripper thing has you rattled-"

"Ripper _thing_? People are dead, organs missing."

"Calm down, mate. I didn't mean it like that," the voice on the other end of the phone said with what could kindly be called soothing coming from a police officer that didn't deal much with the public. On the end of that was a thin static, a reminder that one stood in Quantico while the other was in London. 

"You told me he stopped the Skinner murders you had going on. There were no clues, no leads. You said he ended it all in a single night."

Another sigh followed. There was a bone-deep weariness there, but a share of something else there that he wasn't used to hearing in the Englishman's voice. _Fear_. Not the gibbering sort of fear Jack was used to encountering every day but the kind that lurked at the edges of sanity. It was the fear he heard when fellow agents would start to tell him some sort of wild or impossible story. ' _You're never going to believe this, Jack, but this is what really happened..._ '. "I don't know if he can help you. I don't know if you even want him to help you. I've almost got Sherlock convinced to take a look at the case instead of him. Sherlock might be a pain in the arse to deal with, but he'll be loads more helpful."

That fear almost unsettled Jack Crawford enough that he wanted to call back his words. Almost. But the Ripper was out there, and he (or she) wasn't stopping. "Please," he said, and it felt like he was offering his soul up.

Silence spun out between them, the thin crackle on the wire an unnatural purr. "All right, Jack. All right. Last I heard, he was in your neck of the woods."

It took Jack Crawford two hours to call the number he had been given. He was taken enough of a risk with Will, wasn't he? Even he could see the little cracks that were beginning while he tried to ignore the times Will kept wanting to not look. Whoever this man was, he unnerved his friend despite the results.

That disquiet stayed with him even when a sleep rough voice answered. Jack Crawford had known Detective Inspector Gregory Lestrade for years. He was a bulldog of a man, one that never wavered or turned from whatever was in his path. During that time, he'd never known Lestrade to be afraid of much. "This is Special Agent Jack Crawford of the FBI. I'm trying to reach John Constantine."

**Baltimore, Maryland**

**  
\-------------------**

Daylight was the beginnings of a stain in the dark skies of Baltimore.

Hannibal Lecter slept on his back and without dreams. His chest rose and fell with slow measured breaths. In his memory palace where the semi-conscious part of himself walked, he stopped long enough to listen to the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra reach the crescendo of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Something was wrong in the woodwinds section he'd need to fix before long.

Will Graham twisted himself up in his sweat-stained sheets in another turn. The dogs about whined softly before settling back down. They had gotten used to the dream fear scent. Winston watched worriedly, head on paws.

Jack Crawford laid awake watching Bella's face. The now thin skin clung to the bones beneath. Dark hollows filled the underneath of her eyes. In his mind, he could hear the call of _Bella, Bella, Bella_ and still remember how she had looked vibrant and **alive** , laughing over her shoulder at them.

John Constantine was sleeping off more vodka than had been advisable, cheap hotel sheets that had cradled thousands of others pushed down to his waist. The room smelled of an unlovely mix of cigarette smoke and old booze. Like Will, his eyes tracked beneath closed lid although his dreams didn't frightened him as Will's did. He knew his demons, intimately in some cases.

As the sunlight pried its way into the city's darkest parts, it fell on a newly chalked outer wall of the building on the Notre Dame campus that Constantine planned to visit that day. Security cameras would show nothing, citing a mysterious power surge in the early am. Like the other, this one was six feet by four feet precisely. Angels and demons filled the background, fighting and killing each other. A man in a tan trenchcoat was in the foreground of the drawing. The coat billowed behind him as he glanced unconcerned over one shoulder. A cigarette in his mouth was protected by his right hand. All of the colors were muted except for the lurid rusty red writing scrawled across it - **REPENT END IS NIGH**.

When the FBI arrived in two hours, they would find it was an unknown victim's blood.

They would also discover a victim at the base of the painting, cut and strung with fishing line in the manner of Budish's victims... the angel-maker. The only difference between the victims before and this one was a series of numbers cut into the man's forehead. **08/10/1880**

For now, it was quiet.  
For now, the man Jack Crawford had reached last night hadn't contacted John Constantine and knew better than to try.  
For now, Baltimore was just beginning to stir to life.

It wouldn't be long before the screams began.

And kept on.

**Author's Note:**

> This was inspired by the best Hannibal rper on Dreamwidth, a gifted writer and great person. I miss your brilliance.


End file.
